Log in

moffat's jekyll

Watching Stephen Moffat's JEKYLL. I'm only a couple episodes in, and it's alternately terrific and disappointing. The casting is great, and the Grand Moff does a great job of laying suspense for the Jekyll/Hyde transformation: at first, you see everything from the point of view of Tom Jackman, the Jekyll figure, so when he blacks out and doesn't know what happens, neither does the audience. It's really effective. And Hyde is nicely done; the changes are subtle, but they're there, and those and the lead's body language do a great job of

That said, it's disappointing because the opening scene brilliantly sets up an absolutely awesome dynamic, and a gimmick that's really quite good -- and then we wind up with a conspiracy story. There's a story about Prof. Hugo Dyson, who was the curmudgeon of J.R.R. Tolkien's readings to his fellow faculty members; Tolkien would be weaving this wondrous scenario, and bringing on new fantastic beings, and from the depths of his armchair, Dyson would grunt, "Oh, Christ, not *another* fucking elf." That's pretty much how I feel about conspiracy stories. Moff, you had me with Jackman and the hot psychiatric nurse! There's no need to bring black vans into it!

I'll probably watch the rest, but it's not setting me on fire. Sort of the equivalent of Moffat's library episode of DOCTOR WHO; it was really good, mind, but after the garking brilliant "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" and "Blink," it didn't make much of an impact on me.

navigate

about

YOU NEED A BOOK.

The collected poems from my descent into madness year spent writing daily poems are now available from Lulu as the cheapest 330-page book they would let me make ($16.20). If that's too pricey, you can also get it from Lulu as a free download, or just click on the "a poem every day" tag to read them here. But if you did buy one, that'd be awesome.